Dulce et Decorum est (Sweet and fitting it is) that Jackie finally posts on the right poem...

Just realized I totally posted on the wrong poem....again. It'd be nice if I could get my life together, but that'd be too much to ask for, right?

So seeing as I signed up to write about Dulce et Decorum est and probably confused everyone because we're not doing Prufrock until after the break...

So I translated Dulce et Decorum Est and what I got was "Sweet and fitting it is."And at first that struck me as super odd, because the poem is about these poor soldiers, dirty and dying. What is sweet and fitting about that? In any sense at all? And then I got to the end and saw that I had another thing to translate. "Ducle et Decorum est pro patria mori" means "sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country."He calls it a lie. I realized that he was trying to use it as anti-propaganda. He says that everyone is telling the children stories of the war and calling for more war, calling these people heroes and saying that they got to die in these glorious ways. 

But it did not sound like anyone was dying in any sort of wonderful, glorifying way. These men are exhausted and headed home after a fight, when war hits them yet again in the form of gas bombs or something along those lines. And then this soldier watches his comrade die and can't get the image out of his head. Owen wrote this poem to try and tell people that they have not seen the war, so they don't actually know what war is like. They have not been on the battlefields, watching men with not enough supplies and struggling to stay alive. They have not seen the wounded and the dying. And yet they keep trying to encourage people that war was a good thing and that they should give up their lives for the sake of the war.

It's true; every word of this poem is true. War is not this glorious thing and it certainly is not the only answer to problems. But at the same time, its not so easy as to just tell people not to call for war. Just because your country doesn't call for war doesn't mean another country is just going to say "well, you're right, let's just go get some froyo and call it a compromise." We glorify these stories because we want these men to be remembered as these glorious people. Even if they died alone on a battlefield, not because they saved someone from a bomb or because they were even part of the fighting at all, they still put themselves out on that field to die for their country. I know he's saying its not sweet and fitting to die for your country, but I didn't think that was the point of the saying. Its the fact that these men have so much love for their country that they are willing to die is so sweet and fitting. So, while I entirely agree that the call for war is never the answer, I disagree that we shouldn't glorify these men. It is entirely awful that they have to die like that, but it is still beautiful that they are willing to try for their country like that. 

But maybe thats just me. Alright, back to this god forsaken paper again. Sorry for the confusion. See ya'll tomorrow! 

Run for your lives! It's the Second Coming!

Oh Yeats, how you love to toil on the the complexities of the world...

The Second Coming, huh? This is an apocalyptic poem if I've ever read one! Brimstone and fire coming down to damn us all for our sins and for being the creators of war which have scorched our Earth. Okay, you get the picture so let us get down to where Yeats is going with all of this..

First Verse: 
So as the Norton tell us, this is post World War One & The Russian Revolution. Which, to date (in modernity), are the most violent and heinous events of human conduct. The body count was out of control and the people left in the wake were suffering and trying to rebuild, "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Yeats saw this all as the process of his 2000 year cycle starting. He believed that every 2000 years a new age would begin, but before that process could begin there had to be great suffering in order to achieve this 'revelation.' The first stanza tells us how we have brought this apocalypse onto ourselves. We've tainted tides with innocent blood and yielded to 'passionate intensity,' or our animalistic nature, and perpetuated violence with brute force instead of expressing our convictions in civilized manners.

Second Verse:
*Background- Yeats was a big fan of locking himself in pitch dark and soundproof rooms & he believed after a while, his unconscious would play out like a movie before his eyes and show him the future, or clarify things in the world that he could not understand during the waking life aka his collective unconscious*
The revelation he has in the second verse is one that he is having while in his chamber. He dreams of the Sphinx getting up and roaming the desert. But why the Sphinx? Perhaps the Sphinx represents Ireland. Traditionally the figure has a female face, read: Mother Ireland. Also it is considered merciless, read: IRA soldiers who will battle for Independence in the Anglo-Irish War. Line 16: "Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Reel shadows of indignant desert birds" Yeats is telling us that it is his job as the poet (read:bird) to express the true feelings of the Irish people through his art. The people feel that they are being unjustly treated like savages by the British. He is using poetry and artistry to tell the story of how violent wars are necessary in order to achieve a new age of enlightenment. 

How Yeats felt:

Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

My computer is basically broken which is making writing this paper and this blog post very hard, but bear with me. Hopefully the spelling is good because I'm typing this whole thing on my phone....here we go.

So the best part about this poem is that's it's weirdly relatable. I feel like we've all been where he is now. There's a girl that he likes and he wants to say something to her, but he's too caught up in thinking about all the inadequacies that other people have told him about himself. So he tells himself that he's got time to fix himself up and exactly what she wants him to be, but he ends up wasting time and watching his life pass him by. I mean, who hasn't been there? The boy you like sits next to you in math class and you long to talk to him, but your friends just remind you of the giant pimple on your face  and you want it to go away.  When it's gone and you finally feel the littlest bit confident, you start your walk to talk to him, it's too late! He already has a girlfriend! The overall plot in this story is one that is so classic, basic, and relatable, but it's the stuff around the poem (the allusions and such) that make it so much more powerful.

I think one of the most powerful lines in this poem is when he was "murder and create." It's so true though. People in British literature we've read will make a personality, decide it's not good enough, and then just kill it off and think they can just create something new. He talks about creating a new face to meet all the other faces, and visions and revisions of oneself. It kind of reminded me of the other poem we read about art being useless. These people are kind of like clay. They think they can mold themselves into whatever they think society wants them to be at the time, or whatever they think will be  most impressive to whomever it is they want to impress. But in this way, they are really useless. This new personality is just for them to look pretty temporarily. It will only suffice for so long, and then they will just throw it away for a prettier version.

Finally, there's obviously a lot about class hierarchy in this poem. This girl is obviously an upper class lady, and Prufrock is second class. He doesn't sound too far below, because he talks of wearing fancy clothing, but he has to fasten it with a simple pin. And he puts himself a step below being a lord, because being an advisor is not too far below. But he compares it to being a fool anyway. I took this as him saying that if you're not in the exact same social class, you might as well be on opposite sides often spectrum. But that was just my take, could be wrong!

Okay, time to finish my Prufrock break and get back to writing  my paper. Best of luck to you all figuring or what the heck Brit lit is!!

Modernist Responses to the Great War

Be sure to check out the excellent and highly useful Modernist Journal Project (http://modjourn.org/) so you can play around a bit with some of the rare and stunning pieces in their digital archive.

In the mean time, you can peruse the excerpts from BLAST in our Norton, or look at these images below:

Think especially about the ways in which the horrors of war may have influenced the form and presentation of literature during the period.

The Bizarre Nature of the Stiff Upperlip

For those of you unfamiliar with the joy that is the BBC's Blackadder, here's a great clip from the end of the series on World War One. A few things to notice about this clips: the sense of bathos, the humor inherent in the hopeless nature of the War, and the desire to escape from death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH3-Gt7mgyM

And here are some of the more colorful WWI propaganda posters:

History, Anthropology and English in Heart of Darkness

Okay, I can’t get away from the history major thing this week. I was a little confused about exactly where Marlow’s ship went in the story (when he was talking about the great river on the map, I immediately defaulted to the Nile. Woops). Then I looked it up really quick, and figured out that he was in the Congo! AGH!! Belgium took the Congo under the rule of King Leopold. Leopold, in his desire for more rubber and ivory, lead one of the most infamous genocides of western European expansion (read: it became easier to count how many people weren’t  dead).

Also, it is interesting that the group of people who live up the river are called cannibals. When European anthropologists began to explore African cultures, they found that a lot of these cultures would identify a nearby group a cannibals. These groups were not, in fact, cannibals, but rather simply people of a different culture. The use of cannibals as a way to establish “otherness” and savagery is not unique to the Europeans (in fact, they might have gotten the idea from some of the cultures they encountered). Again, I’d like to point to Kipling’s “We and They.” Specifically, these lines:

We eat kitcheny food.
We have doors that latch.
They drink milk or blood,
Under an open thatch.
We have Doctors to fee.
They have Wizards to pay.
And (impudent heathen!) They look upon We
As a quite impossible They!

Although this is a commentary on culture, I was reminded of these words at Marlow’s discover that these people were actually reasonable.

Additionally, Kurtz is presented to be a humanitarian, a good man, before Marlow ever meets him. When the reader (through Marlow) finally meets Kurtz, he fails to live up to the expectation of a humanitarian . Tis he is certainly not, and I am so glad that Marlow pointed out the fact that so many lives had been lost in the search for Kurtz. 

As a history major, I love this poem. ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is a seriously important piece of historical literature because it captures the devastation that the white men wreaked on the lands and peoples they were invading, as well as the white man’s feelings about it. We can see the troubles that white men were concerned with. We can see the motivations (or at least, the justification of some of the motivations) of the men who were to deal directly with the people who were suddenly folded in the British empire.

As an English major, Rudyard Kipling is a bit of a mysterious guy. I’ve been in classes in which the entire class time was devoted to an argument of whether or not Kipling really meant what he said, or if he was a mind-ninja working within the constraints and expectations of society. I tend to fall on the side of the latter. That is not to say that Kipling was a nice guy, working for justice in a society full of racist elitists. But observing his writing style, I think Kipling was fully aware of the white man’s ability to wreak havoc and devastation.

Here’s why; in ‘We and They’ (see below), Kipling turns around at the end and recognizes the thoughts of the ‘heathens’ when considering the white men. After reading ‘We and They,’ ‘The White Man’s Burden’ looks a little different. Small statements (‘captives'; ‘The silent, sullen peoples/Shall weigh your gods’ and you’) begin to read a bit differently. I’m certainly not saying that Kipling thought that British expansion, or even the treatment of indigenous people was wrong, but it seems to me that he definitely had some idea of how the white men would be perceived, and how there was suffering, not just on the side of the British people, but on the side of those they conquered as well. .

We and They

FATHER, Mother, and Me Sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, And every one else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way, But - would you believe it? - They look upon We As only a sort of They ! We eat pork and beef With cow-horn-handled knives. They who gobble Their rice off a leaf, Are horrified out of Their lives; And They who live up a tree, And feast on grubs and clay, (Isn't it scandalous?) look upon We As a simply disgusting They! We shoot birds with a gun. They stick lions with spears. Their full-dress is un-. We dress up to Our ears. They like Their friends for tea. We like Our friends to stay; And, after all that, They look upon We As an utterly ignorant They! We eat kitcheny food. We have doors that latch. They drink milk or blood, Under an open thatch. We have Doctors to fee. They have Wizards to pay. And (impudent heathen!) They look upon We As a quite impossible They! All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They: But if you cross over the sea, Instead of over the way, You may end by (think of it!) looking on We As only a sort of They !